


dirty canvases to call my own

by coffeesuperhero



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Community: Pilots Presents, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-01
Updated: 2011-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-14 07:30:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeesuperhero/pseuds/coffeesuperhero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, Kara draws memories she hasn't yet made.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dirty canvases to call my own

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** Mentions of domestic violence.  
>  **Disclaimers** : This isn't for profit, just for fun. All characters & situations belong to RDM, David Eick, Sci-Fi, NBC Universal and their various subsidiaries. Title from a song by Jars of Clay, which I also had nothing to do with.  
> 

Kara's been drawing as long as she can remember, and maybe even before that. Back before he skipped town, her old man used to tease her about it, tell her that she was drawing before she could talk, swirling the colors of her baby food together on the tray of her high chair in strange patterns. When she got older, she learned to hold a pencil, she learned about perspective, depth, shading.

School was always a pain in the ass, but it kept her from mother for a few hours every day, so sitting through hours of boring coursework seemed like a small price to pay for a little peace. She didn't care much for most of her classes, and she was bright enough to fake her way through most of the bullshit they assigned her, so she doodled through everything, always carrying the ratty sketchbook her father had given her before he left. She'd found it on her bed the morning they woke up to find him gone, the first page of it covered with a pencil sketch of the mandala she can't seem to stop drawing, the only connection she had left to someone she swears doesn't matter.

When she hit high school, her mother refused to allow her to sign up for art classes, said they were a waste of time, that she'd just end up like her father, a pathetic waste of space and air. Kara got mad, and then she got stupid. That's when she threw the punch, the flat smack of her fist against her mother's jaw the most satisfying sound she'd ever heard. Socrata set the sketchbook on fire as punishment. It was the first time Kara had let herself cry in years, alone in her room with her hand clapped over her mouth so her mother wouldn't have the satisfaction.

She kept her sketches locked up tight after that. She thought about getting a fake I.D., strolling into the bank across from the high school downtown, and asking for a safe deposit box, but the championship games were coming up soon and between practice and class, she didn't have the time or the cash, so she put everything she drew in her locker, triple-checking it at the end of every day. The things she drew then weren't kind and they weren't pretty, but they were what she needed, and they kept her out of a lot of the trouble she might have been in without them.

After she blew her knee, she picked up painting, hoping that something new would distract hers from the pain and the frustration. She started with fingerpaint, because it was what they had at the hospital where she had to stay for a few days after they fixed her knee. It was messy and she loved it, the slippery feeling of the fresh paint between her fingers. They only had primary colors, and without thinking about it she started to paint that damn mandala all over again. The first thing she did when they let her out was hit up the art store, swapping her borrowed fingerpaints and copy paper for oils and real canvas.

Zak had always loved her work, loved to watch her fill up a blank canvas while she experimented with paint, with light and color and texture. The week after they had Lee over for dinner, after their mutual frak-up that they swore they'd pretend had never happened, she caught herself drawing him, or at least, her version of him, all hard chiseled lines and well-defined muscles, the glorious light of the sun behind his shoulders, his face too bright for mortals to see. She had nearly jumped out of her skin when Zak came up behind her to see what she was working on. He had asked who it was, and she had shrugged her shoulders, trying to be the portrait of casual, and told him that it was no one, just some god of her own imagining, but she had lied. It was Lee.

It's always Lee, every time, in her dreams, in her nightmares, and now that the frakking worlds have ended, in her life, every godsdamn day, a constant reminder of a need she can't even begin to explain. She still finds herself drawing him, even when she sits down to draw something or someone else entirely, it comes back to Lee. She can't get away from him. She pencils his callsign on the side of the Viper that she draws during a briefing, edits him into the inky memory of a triad game he never attended. It's exhausting, how _present_ he is in her life. It's frightening that she thinks she might want him to be. The night after the whole thing with the Olympic Carrier, she gets good and plastered and gives in to a wild desire to draw everything that's never really happened between them. It's not sappy and it's not sentimental, because that's just not her, but it's honest, and after she's done she feels better than she has in a long time.

The next day, she takes a sober second look at it, decides she should shred it, light it on fire maybe, just in case, but after the thing with her mother all those years ago she just can't bring herself to flick the lighter open and let the flame devour another piece of her. She stashes it in her locker underneath some towels and extra tanks and tells herself that she'll flush it tomorrow, but tomorrow never really comes.

Then he finds it. Of course he does. There's not much that's private on a battlestar, and one night when he asks, shirtless and looking better than she really wants to admit, if she's got a spare towel, she even doesn't think, just makes some snide remark about the CAG needing to be better prepared and directs him to her locker for a towel. He grabs the only one she's got left, pulling the sketch out with it. He's looking at it before she can react, and there's no way she can lie her way out of this one. It's a damn good drawing, drunk as she was when she did it, and it's obviously _them_ , and it's obviously _hers_ , because, idiot that she was, she frakking initialed it, like she was going to give it to him as a frakking present or something.

"Is this..." he tries to say, and she just stares at her feet for a minute. "It's... I didn't know you could do this," he stammers, and she looks at him, curious. "I mean, it's, um. It's really good," he says, waving his hands around like he's trying to find the controls to fly this conversation into safer airspace. "You're... you're good, that's all."

"Whatever," she mumbles, reaching her hand out for the drawing, hoping he'll just hand it back and go, but he keeps right on looking, and finally she sighs, exasperated, and tries to grab it, but he steps back at the last second. "Lee, seriously. Give it back."

"No takebacks," he mutters, and there's something oddly familiar about that phrase, but new at the same time. He looks up at her, finally, frowning like he's just seeing her for the first time. "Look, is this... do you think we've got a shot at this? Is this what you want?"

Her eyes are wide as she stares at him. This is not at all what she intended to happen, and she wants to bolt for the door, but he's between her and the hatch and from the look in his eyes, if she tries to run, this time, he'll chase her, and maybe after everything they've been through, it's time to stop running, time to stop drawing what she hopes for and give it a real, three-dimensional chance. Putting him on paper isn't keeping him out of her head. Maybe having him here, really here, having a chance to paint over the dirty canvas of everything they have been, replace it with everything they could be, maybe that's the answer. The idea of it is thrilling and terrifying all at once.

"I don't know," she says honestly. "But maybe it's time we found out."  



End file.
